Great question, To get traffic from SEO it must be done diligently. And the best way to do that is from a well structured article. The key things to remember that will help your pages rank well: Keyword Headings Put your most important keywords here. They must be coherent, simple yet descriptive. If your blog allows you to insert H1 headings into your article, do so. Don't cram too much info into keywords though, Search engines are smart and recognize when someone is spamming. Maybe do a bit of research using 'Google Keyword Tool' In Google Adwords and see if your keywords are popular search terms. Links and Back links Include links to relevant info when you can, the more credible sources your website links to, the better appeal it has to search engines. Also include back links. Back links are links to a location somewhere that also features a link going directly back to your site, these also give your article good standing. Duplicate Content Try not to say anything twice, and if you do use different terminology. But the main focus here is to always write fresh content. If the content of your article has been written word for word somewhere else first how can yours possibly be more credible? Also write often, the more frequent you post articles, the more frequently your site will be "crawled" by bots. If you do this well your listing can only rise. Be Unique and have the Best Info This entails just doing what you do and doing it well. It might be difficult to compete with other websites if the topic your discussing is already covered in great detail. The best position to be in is one of having information that everyone wants but cannot find anywhere else. A good tip for this is finding a specific niche that suits you well to draw in traffic to your general topic. Hope this helps you get started. For an in depth look at SEO rankings, take a look at the 'Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors' http://searchengineland.com/seotable

The most important legal ramification of a Canadian launching a business in Silicon Valley is immigration. You must have a visa that allows you to operate the business (hire and manage employees, etc) in order to be running a business. I started a business in Canada and was able to attract great Silicon Valley angel investors to invest in the Canadian corp. In the early-stages, there is less importance placed on where the business is domiciled than what the business has managed to achieve or who it's founders are. There are significant advantages to keeping the business in Canada in the earliest stages and then moving to the Valley as you look to raise further funds and scale your business. Without a doubt, it's good to be making frequent trips to SF & the Valley so as to build your network but from an actual formation perspective, I would argue that there are more benefits in the majority of cases to staying in Canada in the earliest stages. Happy to talk to you about this in a brief call. Best of luck!

The highest-impact growth marketing tactics for a B2B SaaS startup with zero customers is often direct outreach. When you're at a point where you don't have customer validation, it's incredibly hard to get useful data from very small amounts of traffic. So in a zero customer state, your highest-impact effort is direct outreach. Signing-up customers one-by-one is the best way to get customer validation and you'll learn a ton of valuable data along the way. Once your customer validation is complete and you have at least a handful of customers *actively* using the product, then you have the rationale to start spending and experimenting with growth marketing tactics. Happy to discuss the customer development process with you and share with you what has been successful for me in doing direct-outreach to enterprise customers.

I use www.coindesk.com + search YouTube for "bitcoin 2013". There's everything from the talks at Bitcoint 2013 conference to podcast interviews with lead engineer. Also, there's 3 amazing Clarity experts who can shed some light.

The highest quality and cost is https://contently.com/ - $200+ per post. Alternatively, I've uses http://jobs.problogger.net/ job board to post an opportunity, and then create a simple "test" for the writers. If they read the instructions and the content is great, try em' out .. if not, then pass. It takes time but you can find great people who will blog for $30-50 per post. Another way - not fast but high quality - is to approach existing blogs in your vertical with smaller audiences ... ask them to guest post or ghostwrite for you .. they already know the subject matter and blogging + if they have an audience you can incentivize them to promote the content via their social channel (by paying social share bonuses). Hope that helps.

Though I don't have experience in that particular market sector - I DO have experience dealing with that challenge. Every dollar you borrow increases your risk exposure so you have to factor that into your ROI. Pay careful attention to the terms of the loan (or LOC) and if at all possible your business should be the guarantor (versus you personally taking on that role). That said - Here are my brief thoughts: 1. Unless you need a lump sum - go with a line of credit versus a loan. 2. Consider hiring someone to do contract work versus bringing on a salaried employee. 3. Unless you already have adequate work for them (i.e. their efforts will be profitable) don't bring employees on. (I mention this because you state that "you need the work to feed them" - suggesting that you might be bringing them on FIRST... before there's a need). 4. In many markets - salespeople work on commission. Perhaps you can find someone that will work for 100% commission thereby eliminating your need for a loan to give them a paycheck. Harsh Statement Warning... (don't read on if you are easily offended): The truth is that If you are currently unable to generate sufficient business (i.e. you need someone to do that for you) then you don't yet have a "business". Note that I define a business as an entity that has discovered and successfully implemented a viable business model (and is therefore profitable) and fulfills the criteria of being both repeatable and scalable to the extent required by the owner to be worth moving forward with. If you'd like a more detailed explanation and help deciding next steps, you know how to reach me. Best of luck to you!

Having 4 dogs and being a former sugar addict, I love the idea of dog cupcakes, kudos! My wife and I are currently solving a very similar issue with her t-shirt business. We don't have a freshness issue to deal with like you do, however we do have a scalability and growth issue that we are tackling. Understand, there isn't really anything that remarkable about dog cupcakes, it's cool concept but it would be very easy for someone to deconstruct and create their own recipe and brand. So you'll need to focus on how you sell your cupcakes. What value you offer your customers? Why your recipe is unique? Is there any portion of your product, formula or service that could be trademarked or patented? Do you have a memorable name, tagline and mascot? Are the health benefits to your product? I know that in some cases pet food can be highly regulated so you may not be able to make specific health claims. Next, I think you should look at a three pronged approach that is scalable: 1. Continue to develop your local market, treating it like a test kitchen. Work on new recipes, concepts, products, ideas and test them locally. Build a unique product line and a unique system for creating those products. 2. Develop a strong network of pet owners, pet shops, boutiques, organizations and so on. 3. Market your dog cupcake system and sell it as a turnkey package. This could be as simple or as fancy as you want to make it. The simple way would be to sell one time "starter package" with upgrades on a subscription model. This would include order forms, marketing plans, marketing materials, new product ideas, training videos, shopping lists, ingredients and so on. The expensive way would be to lawyer up and create an actual franchise but this can be very very expensive. I hope this was helpful and I'd be happy to work with you further on developing your business. Good luck and I look forward to buying Sadie, Charlie, Nixie and Sachi some tasty treats from you in the near future!

Is it strictly a case of one or the other? Why couldn't you find part or full-time employment in an area that will develop your skill and dedicate the rest of your time to applying what you learn to building your startup slowly? Going full-tilt may be exciting but without savings, it can be difficult and stressful. At some point your startup's needs may surpass your ability and then you may find yourself in a position of giving away equity to get to the next level or even having to call it quits for lack of resources. A third option could be finding work in an environment (like ours) where you can both hone your relevant skills, working on diverse web projects, *and* get full no support building your personal project, which I'm assuming is web development-heavy. We get that people have bigger aspirations than their regular day job. We should talk!

Glass will be disruptive. I'm in the first set of users on it and it's impressive. I see a new class of services and products with not only the immediacy of the phone, but the power of first-person augmentation. Think of the possibilities! Developers can help people communicate better, know more, live healthier, become smarter, remember more, do more, record more, consume more, and so on and so on. Glass entrepreneurs have a real opportunity to touch people's lives in a very intimate way. I think there is tremendous opportunity for companies that do this right.

No. The ongoing costs are significant, it's very difficult to create liquidity and trading volume, and the valuation is often lower than what that same company could achieve in venture funding. Also, the CEO's time is spent managing investor relations in a very inefficient way.

Easy :) There are a number of companies that make games which would work with your steering wheel. If those companies have captured the email address of their users (or have the ability to send push notifications to the device) then they already have a direct relationship to your market. Go to these companies (all of them), and create a profit sharing deal that incentivizes everyone involved. If they promote your product to their user base then they will receive $X per conversion. It's a win-win-win. Customer wins because they find out about an accessory that they care about. Gaming company wins because they brought their customers something cool and useful, and they make money from the transaction. You win because you get tens of thousands of pings being sent out on your behalf to a perfectly targeted market, without spending any money upfront, and only spending money on the back end when the purchase has already happened and there is no unknown monetary risk. If you need more growth strategies - give me a call.

Thank you for your question. It comes at a perfect time because I have just started mentoring a young woman from Nepal via the WeduFund nonprofit because I believe that the world needs more female leaders: in my opinion the world will be a much better place when we have a 50-50 presence of female-male leaders in all fields. The way you phrased your question makes me want to share two disclaimers before I continue: 1. Any answer given here has to be a generalization: all women (and men) are different. Every single client I work with (man and woman) has a different story and requires to find their own unique path the building their leadership persona. I understand that you're looking for general trends, which is what I will focus on. 2. Your question implies a difference between men and women. To keep this answer relatively short, the only difference I will highlight is that in my experience of coaching, training and mentoring women managers, executives and entrepreneurs is that women tend to have the reverse strengths and weaknesses men have. For example, most of my male and female clients agree with the statement "when men think, they say they know; when women know, they say they think". Please let me know if this was actually the focus of your question. In business as well as in media, most leadership personas are still portrait by men. A direct result is that most female leaders believe they have to emulate the way men cultivate their leadership (which may very well work for some!). The three basic principles will always be the same, however the journey and the way to fulfill these principles will alway be different: 1. Building your brand. I have written a book called "you are your brand" where I describe this process in more details. You have to tell a great story, show your vision, share your values and walk the talk. Your brand must be build within your organization, within your network of friends, within your industry as well as on social media. How does your peronsal brand look like now? What does your ideal brand look like? 2. Building relations up (hierarchic superiors, mentors), side-ways (colleagues at the same level, clients, suppliers) and down (direct team members, junior employees). A persona is an image people have of you: once you have clarity of your brand, you have to create a network of people who know and believe in your brand. Cultivating relations and building a strong network of followers is crucial to establishing your leadership. How are you current relations up, sideways and down? Which ones do you need most improvement on? 3. Continuously grow as a leader: some people may be tempted to build a leadership persona without actually being great leaders. You can build the best brand in the world but if you don't walk the talk, people will eventually notice your persona is only sparks and artefacts. It is crucial that you continuously grow as a leader because the best leader create leaders. In other words, your leadership will be most fully established the moment your mentees / followers have taken your position. This means that you must have taken the steps to grow to the next level up. What are your strengths and successes as a leader? What does the next level of leadership look like for you: where are you going? A good example of a female leader who does not attempt to emulate male leadership is Sheryl Sandberg, COO at Facebook. I recommend to many of my female clients to this her book "Lean In" because it is a great basis for developing our coaching relationship. While reading the book, make notes of what you can relate to and what does not relate to you: we can then focus on the similarities and differences because like everyone... you are unique. If you want to explore how to build your brand, how to build relations and how to grow as a leader, you can get in touch via Clarity or take a look at my work on www.about.me/noamkos

I believe that "charismatic" isn't something you call yourself - It's something your audience / team / followers calls you. In my experience charismatic people do tend to be extraordinarily passionate people. So perhaps to become more charismatic - be more passionate.

Engagement matters most. Engagement is actually a function of great product and great distribution. Engagement is thought-of mostly as a product issue but in many cases, it also expresses itself as a distribution problem particularly where there is no possibility for a "single player" experience (marketplaces, feedback loops, anything attempting to be inherently social) If you have sustained engagement (a product experience loved by users) you will be successful, limited only by the potential number of people in the world that need the experience you provide and growing at a rate closely correlated to your distribution channels. Inefficient distribution is easier to optimize for then insufficient product. So to this extent, product matters more. But available distribution channels (or more accurately, the unavailable distribution tactics) also can define a company's fundraising options, and more definitively, the overall cultural and corporate DNA of the organization that forms around product & distribution. This is the best, most generalized answer I can provide to your question. Happy to talk to you and provide you a more contextually relevant answer to your own circumstances.

My understanding is that neither LivingSocial nor Groupon avail their discounts to "outcall-only" services. A new suite of services are cropping-up that might be better for you as a service provider. Two notable ones include http://www.mytime.com/ and http://www.prompt.ly Also, I'd encourage you to speak with peers or even book massage appointments via different services and talk with the service providers about their experience before doing so yourself. I have several friends who are body-workers who have expressed dissatisfaction with their experience with "daily deal" sites. The two apps I mention are much more a "personal calendaring" service for people who sell their time, mixed with some commerce components. Hope this helps.

I've been running a bitcoin only e-commerce business for 6 months now. Previous currencies might have involved cryptography, but not to the extent that Bitcoin employs it. What is special about it, is that the cryptographic schemes behind Bitcoin allows it to be DECENTRALIZED. There is no company, or body that can be swayed into changing the allocation of the currency. The bitcoin protocol is truly impressive in the way that it is almost it's own autonomous institution, providing value to humanity, and thus being supported by human activity. Here's a brief run down of how it works, with some shortcuts. 1. "Bitcoin" is a decentralized means of tracking and assigning wealth or economic value. Bitcoin is a software protocol, computer network, idea, community, movement, etc. 2. A "bitcoin" is a unit of the currency that is moved around by the Bitcoin network. 3. Central to Bitcoin is a public ledger, known as the Block Chain. Roughly every 10 minutes, a new "block" is added to this chain or ledger. This ledger records all of the transaction that have taken place in the last 10 minutes, and what quantities of bitcoin currency are now held at different public addresses. 4. A public address is a a 27 to 34 character string of uppercase, lowercase letters and the digits from 0 to 9. AKA base 58. 5. Each public address has a corresponding private key. Whoever has this key, may spend the coins that are held at this private address. Private keys are 51 characters long in the same format as a public address. 6. To spend an amount of bitcoin, you must use your private key to cryptographically sign the transaction, sending your bitcoin to another address. 7. This message or transaction is then broadcast to the network, and the computers in the network begin working to write into the block chain (or public ledger) that your address no longer has the amount that was sent, but that that amount is now held at the receiving address. 8. Each new set of transaction is recorded on the block chain, every 10 minutes as mentioned above. 9. All of the computers that are working to write new blocks to the block chain, are known as miners. 10. These computers are all racing to solve a cryptographic puzzle, which is required to write the new block. 11. The computer that solves the puzzle, and writes the new block receives an award of newly created bitcoin. 12. The reward associated with each block began at 50 in 2009, is now 25, and will halve every 4 years, until an ultimate quantity of 21 million bitcoin are created. 13. This transparency is a large part of the value created by Bitcoin, in that the rate of creation, and current amount in existence is known. That is my best attempt at translating what has taken me months to wrap my head around, and the implications go much further. I'm happy to answer other questions about Bitcoin; the system, the community, or business challenges and opportunities associated with it.

I've been into bitcoin since 2011, and here's my brief take on where the opportunity lies. - Mining: Bitcoin mining is too difficult unless you invest a significant amount of money into it, think over $10,000 ... and it only becomes profitable if the price of bitcoin does another 10X (which it may. - Mining: Altcoins may be the quicker path to profits (http://coinmarketcap.com/) ... mine some altcoins and then converting them to bitcoin through one of the exchanges like cryptsy.com - Buying: I am waiting for another price crash before I buy back into bitcon, I'm hoping it will drop to $500. I see it rising back up over $2000 if it does drop, however now that the Chinese are into bitcoin, its a real possibility that the price will just keep rising. - Arbitrage: The price difference between exchanges is massive. You can now buy bitcoin at btc-e for $1000 and sell it instantly at mtgox.com for $1200. If you had $100,000 to arbitrage with, that is a cool $20,000 profit. The probem is that these exchanges may go down at any time and you risk losing your money/bitcoins. -Startup: You could build something with real value, although the competition now is fierce to build a product with real value that has not already been built. VC's are getting hot for bitcoin startups, check out press on Ripple Labs, BTC China, BitInstant, Coinbase, etc. There are some other opportunities, like buying a bitcoin ATM machine from a franchise (Robocoin, Lamassus) or something a little more in the grey area like starting a bitcoin casino. There's lots of opportunity in cryptocurrency if you look hard enough, I feel though that the window of opportunity for massive profits and value creation is narrowing due to the eyeballs looking at the bitcoin world right now. So whatever you want to do, take massive action and do it fast before you lose momentum and first movers advantage.

The basics of SEO are: Crawlability: proper HTML mark-up and syntax starting with the document head right down to the <div> structure. If search engine robots can't parse your code then it doesn't matter how relevant it is to the search query. Authority: content that is popular tends to rank well, this is due to a high signal to noise ratio based on the qualitative metrics that Google's algorithm is taking into account - metrics like organic click-through rate from the SERP, adjusted bounce rate on the page, average time on site, etc. Links: authority is built over time and through trust. One of Google's leading trust indicators is links back to your site or page from other trusted (authoritative) sources. At the end of the day Google (and search engines in general) are looking to provide the best experience for their users, delivering the most relevant and useful results as fast as possible. If your webpage is delivering value, solving a problem, or answering a question then you are off to a good start.

I recommend you breakdowns of the particular to the smallest deliverable. You can use the tool WBS Chart Pro

In the late 1990s I was the Express Logistics Supervisor for DHL International's HUB in Bahrain. You need clear inventory database with scanning tech, and I imagine secure lock up, you'd need very accurate procedures to avoid liability, alarm/security/ tracking systems. Would you be partnering with parcel services? I'd have to know the scale & locations, plus what research you've already done. Feel free to connect to further clarify & get a to do list.

One of our clients went with a card-based approach (http://purelyapp.com). The reasons were: - People understand them. The separation and spacing lead to very little cognitive overhead. - Perfect for responsive layouts, and translate easily to native mobile devices. - Forces you to discriminate - you can't cram too much information in a card (at some point it ceases being a card), so it provides a nice constraint and keeps your product simpler. - Easier to A/B test. Cards are a great example of what Andrew Chen has called an 'open system'. Many layouts are just loops of cards, which means making changes to a card object is trivial vs. changing the layout of a less modular, more structured page. Hope that helps!

The ways I've done this in the past are 1) Find some customers that are willing to hire you (or your product) but know that you'll only be free nights & weekends to support/work with them. 2) Find a "partner" (co-founder or other) that's got a flexible schedule that can help build the business while you're at work. 3) Block out nights, mornings and weekends to build the business till you have enough orders to cover 50% of your salary. This might mean 7pm-11pm most nights, and 4 hours each day Sat & Sun. Make progress (sales $$$) and momentum. All that being said, it's risk reward. Sounds like you want to avoid taken the risk, and I get that .. but the upside is always smaller. Unless you put yourself in a position to have to succeed (ex: quitting your job) then you may never make the scary decisions that are required to build a company (like cold calling, going in debt, making a presentation, etc). I'm on company #5 with many other side projects started nights & weekends .. so I get it - but don't be afraid to bet on yourself and go all in.

Depends on a large number of factors. Here are a couple - 1. If you own and operate them, do you have the capital to grow as fast as you would like? 2. Do you need to franchise, or will a standard license or dealer arrangement suffice? 3. How much control do you need to exercise over the operations of the kiosk, i.e. use of the brand name, pricing, quality control, sales activities, training, marketing, etc. Franchising is a another method of distribution. The real question for you is what is the best method? I always recommend a feasibility study be done to ensure the best method of growth, followed by a strategic plan to do so.

OK someone actually flagged me for spam??? I wrote a book on how to build advisory boards. It directly answers the question posed. I don't make my living off my book. I wrote it to help entrepreneurs. if you want help, then contact me. If not, then good luck. Wow!!

The common theme is to create something truly engaging for your market, at the right time: Instagram was released at the perfect time when many people had iPhones with a decent camera but limited ways of sharing those photos while on the go. SnapChat tapped into a similar (though younger) demographic that now needed a more personal space to share, as the mainstream social networks pressed forward with "no one needs privacy anymore". I'm writing a post covering this exact topic, to be published soon.